I have a love-hate relationship with this small town of Tallahassee – sometimes finding it maddeningly tiny. But today on Valentine’s Day I am reminded why I mostly love it. Tallahassee is full of independent small businesses that do their best to serve customers well, and in a unique way.

Bagelheads is one of those businesses, using the power of social media and the passionate word of mouth of their dedicated customers to thrive. My friend Rachel last week sent out a Tweet wondering aloud what she should get for her baby’s Growing Room daycare teachers as a Valentine’s Day treat. I tweeted back, remembering that she loves Bagelheads, “I wonder if @BagelHeads makes heart-shaped bagels? That would be cute!” Within just a few minutes, the Bagelheads team replied back, “That’s a great idea!” And just like that, Rachel had her treats for the teachers and I had a surprise for my colleagues here at Moore Consulting.

Owner Benjamin Giles, who runs the business along with his wife, took my order via a follow-up e-mail and offered sincere thanks for the idea and for “always looking out for us.” But the truth is, Bagelheads looks out for its customers. They participate in local races (Mrs. Bagelheads is a very fit runner who hasn’t let pregnancy slow her down!), providing the after-race carb fuel. They are part of the community, and are eager to make their customers happy.

This morning, as my colleagues enjoy their heart-shaped bagels, I am a happy, happy customer – grateful to have a business like Bagelheads to make my community better – one “everything” whole wheat bagel at a time!

Today I am proud to announce the launch of MCG Impact. By empowering our staff to follow their passions, we, at Moore Consulting Group, build on our long-standing tradition of giving back to the community through this new program. Every year four staff members will each select a non-profit organization to closely work with and work toward providing a combined $100,000 worth of communications strategy and services among the four organizations. These hand-picked participants will be empowered to make an even bigger impact in their communities, thanks to the tools and training provided by the MCG team.

MCG Impact is the next chapter in our company’s purpose-driven history of commitment to the Tallahassee community and beyond. Successful and prominent programs including 10 in 2010 and 11 in 2011 solidified our resolve to share the wealth of knowledge we have and we are excited to continue this tradition. We’re communicators. It is not our job but our passion to work daily on behalf of clients to which we are truly dedicated. With MCG Impact, we’re committed to seek out and serve non-profit organizations that work as a positive force in our community.

We believe there is no greater gift we can give than to empower selfless organizations and teach them the skills necessary to succeed. The purpose of MCG Impact inspires me daily and I look forward to celebrating the successes of these very worthy organizations throughout this year.

We are pleased to announce the following organizations as our official MCG Impact 2012 participants:

• Honor Flight Tallahassee (selected by Karen Moore, Founder and CEO of MCG)
• Florida Association of Healthy Start Coalitions (selected by Liz Shawen, Director)
• The Arts at Good Samaritan United Methodist Church (selected by Katie Spillman, Account Executive)
• Big Bend Homeless Coalition (selected by Patrick Sheffield, Account Executive)

Recently Facebook introduced Timeline, a radical new profile page that provides a complete summary of your entire life since birth. It includes photos, videos, status updates and locations you have visited. But before Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea of Facebook’s Timeline, there was the Seven Up! Series.

The Up Series, considered by many filmmakers as the greatest documentary, tracked the lives of a group of children at seven-year intervals over the past four decades. Every seven years, since 1964, Michael Apted interviewed each child and explored the assumption that each child’s social class predetermines their future.

When I was 8 years old I had my own  “7-Up” moment. I had just started taking art classes in my hometown and was very passionate about it. I told my self “When I grow up, I want to study art.” Fast-forwarding my timeline, by 1991 I was completing my bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from the University of Puerto Rico. That same year,

I got my first job at Santillana Group as a graphic designer. There I learned my first LIFE LESSON: Never conform. I wanted to do more than just design children’s books and I constantly let my supervisors know it! After only one year on the job, at the age of 24, I was promoted to art director supervising all graphic designers, freelance photographers and illustrators.

2002 was a turning point in my life. By then I was 33 years old when we moved to Tallahassee. I started working at non-profit organization called Florida Children’s Forum. I worked as multi-media production specialist in charge of the design, branding and branding all the programs and services they administered. After five years I decided that it was time for a change. I started asking around and heard that a PR firm in town had an opening. In 2007, I started working at Moore Consulting Group as senior graphic designer. This is my second LIFE LESSON: Don’t quit your job until you have a new one!

In 2009, when I turned 40, I got a crazy idea stuck in my head: go back to college to earn my master’s degree.

Going to college in itself is pretty scary. Going back to college 16 years after you graduated and working full-time, can seem a nightmare. I enrolled in the Integrated Marketing Communications program at FSU with a track in Hispanic Marketing.

In 2011, I finally graduated with a Master of Arts in Communications and a Hispanic Marketing Certificate. I always thought my diploma would just be a trophy I could hang on the wall, a very important question started nagging at me: what’s next? I already had a full time job, a good salary with benefits and over 19 years of experience. What’s next? Here is one thing I am certain of, and this will be the last LIFE LESSON I will to share with you: success comes in time.

Last year, I was promoted to director and was assigned to help increase, Ford Motor Company’s visibility through special events, local media, public relations and influencer outreach among the Hispanic community. In addition, I spearheaded the development of MCG Latino, the Hispanic practice area and presence of Moore Consulting Group. To those that already had their own 7-Up moment, congratulations. If you have not, don’t be discourage. It’s just a matter of time.

How do people change over the years? Can the adult already be found in the child of seven? What account would you give that child of the life you have lived since? These are the questions that have been explored, with mounting tension and surprise over four decades, in one of cinema’s most remarkable enterprises, the Up series. Inspired by the Jesuit maxim “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man,” England’s Granada Television began in 1964 what would become a unique record of English life and Western culture at the end of the 20th century.

In 1964, Granada’s “World in Action” team, including a young Michael Apted (Coal Miner’s Daughter, Gorky Park, Gorillas in the Mist), interviewed a diverse group of seven-year-olds from across England, asking them to describe their lives and hopes. The original 7 Up was a beguilingly unselfconscious social self-portrait from a time when cinema was still young and television an infant — in fact, 7 Up was television’s first experiment in recording real people living their real lives.

Over the years, as Apted has tenaciously pursued the Up series, revisiting the children every seven years as they have grown up, navigating the divides between childhood dreams and adult reality, not all have participated in each succeeding film. Some have reacted against the series’ intrusiveness. Others have embraced their roles. As 49 Up revisits questions of love, marriage, career, class and prejudice — deftly inter-cutting footage from earlier films with contemporary interviews — it discovers surprising ruminations about the Up film series itself as well as unexpected turns in individual lives.

Sticking with the TV theme, consider shows such as Dexter, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, shows about a Miami Metro forensic analyst, high school chemistry teacher turned drug lord, and a 1960s advertising agency, respectively. While these shows are on smaller networks, cater to smaller audiences, and make less money, each has a fiercely devoted fan base, receive critical acclaim, win highest industry honors, and are profitable. Simply put, they’re game changers. The difference between these shows and CSI [insert city here] is simple, they are different. Programs like these tackle topics and develop characters in ways that haven’t been done before and they’ve been successful. Furthermore, the producers didn’t stop being creative after filming the first season. Each show in its own way continues to break conventional TV rules and is not afraid to shock their audience. Dexter fans will never forget the end of Season 4.

So what does this TV show nonsense have to do with your business? I believe there are at least three things you can take away from these shows and apply to your business. Spoiler Alert: Clichés ahead.

1.      Think outside the box – How many times have you heard that statement? Hundreds probably. But how many times have you actually done it? To truly think outside the box you must get outside of your own. Be disruptive. Shake up how things are usually done and try something new. You’ll be surprised how far your imagination will take you.

2.      Paint with your own brush – Most companies spend far too much time worrying about what their competitors are doing. That’s one of the reasons major television networks are constantly ripping off one another’s ideas. Unsurprisingly, their ratings continue to drop.

As Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson wrote in their outstanding book Rework, “Focus on competitors too much and you wind up diluting your own vision. Your chances of coming up with something fresh go way down when you keep feeding your brain other people’s ideas. You become reactionary instead of visionary. You wind up offering your competitor’s products with a different coat of paint.”

3.      Continue breaking new ground – Once you’ve created something unique for your business and developed a following, don’t get lazy. Chances are those who like what you’re doing also like being surprised. There is a powerful group of consumers out there who crave variety so keep pushing.

It worked out pretty well for Apple after all.

• What was the thing I found most joyful last year?
• What was the biggest challenge?
• What would/should I have said to someone that I did not share?
• What was my proudest moment?
• If I turned the clock back to 2011, what is the one thing I would make sure and accomplish? 

I found my answers surprising and they reinforced why I set this year’s resolution.  Interesting.  I  hope you all had a safe, joyful and restful holiday.  May 2012 bring you success with your 2012 resolutions.

Proactive: Wisdom purports that “timing is everything” and indeed that may be true. Sometimes we must act as the timekeeper ourselves, initiating the action – sending out that first smile, calling a friend instead of returning the call and offer the kind unexpected word and action daily.

Clarity: the idea of transparency is trendy, but beyond the trendiness daily progress requires continual focus and pellucid living. This is yes or no, do or do not, black or white, no gray area and nothing stored to clutter your clear vision.

Conficernment: Now there’s a new word for 2012 (my gift.) Start the new year with a dynamic combination of confidence and discernment and you get conficernment. Surely great strides will accompany certitude, assurance and an acuteness of understanding to only do what is the right thing to do.

These three words create action, focus and insight, all of which will ignite your launch sequence for 2012! Headed toward the stratosphere of success. Climb aboard, let’s go!

After much deliberation, I have decided on two things.
1)    Read more
I’ve decided reading for pleasure has taken too much of a back seat in my life. I’ve started reading Sherlock Holmes stories again. I also recently reread a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story titled The Yellow Wallpaper, a fabulous short story that provides commentary about mental health treatments of its time. If you read it with the expectation that it’s going to be funny, you’ll have a blast. I’ve started reading another Charlotte Perkins Gilman work titled Herland. I don’t know what to expect this time, but I’m excited to see what will happen.
2)    Recommit to exercise
My exercise schedule has suffered over the last few months. Since graduation I’ve started a new job, got married and went on my honeymoon. I went from going to the gym every day for two hours to once and twice a week, if that. So from now on, I’m going to make it to the gym five days a week even if it’s only for 30 minutes. I think the mistake people make about exercising is that they let little failures get in their way. Before you know it, you haven’t exercised in weeks because you didn’t feel you had time to devote an hour a day to your health. My mother always says, “How do you conquer a mountain? A little at a time.”

I think behind Thanksgiving, New Year’s is my favorite holiday. Not because of the fun parties and awesome things I get to do New Year’s Eve (I usually don’t do much), but because we are encouraged to objectively look at our lives and see where we can stand to improve. I love the thought of new beginnings and clean slates. It makes me smile. How do you want to start anew this year?

During my most recent visit to the headquarters of Ford Motor Company in Michigan, I took part in a fascinating workshop lead by members of The Moth is a non-profit group, founded in 1997 and based in New York City, dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. Poet and novelist George Dawes Green wanted to recreate the feeling of his evenings in Georgia, when moths were attracted to the light on the porch where he and his friends would gather to share their life stories.
The goal of the workshop was to provide the tools to be able to tell a story in five minutes or less, following these five principles:

1.    Set up the stakes. Talk about a lesson learned in a particular event or situation.
2.    Develop the “arc” or the way the information is revealed in a story. Start by memorizing the first sentence or statement, recognize the changing points and, memorize your closing sentence or statement. Employ many details instead of using a “show and tell” approach.
3.    Define your theme: In one word, what are you trying to communicate?
4.    Make critical choices: Don’t be afraid to edit and abbreviate. Don’t forget that 80 percent of story telling is revisions.
5.    Be yourself: Remember that it is your story you are sharing. People will know if you are being genuine or not.

Robert McKee once said that stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.

Today is a great time to start sharing your wealth.

I thought I would share with you my favorite books to give as gifts. I have wrapped many copies of these books over the past few years. My top books to give include:
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
John Adams by David McCullough
The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr.  Seuss

I am always open to new book suggestions.  So if you have a chance, tell me your favorite book to give this year.

Latinos accounted for more than half of the nations growth in the past decade. Their buying power hangs at around $1 trillion, and for the first time in history, more are being born in the US than migrating from foreign countries.

If U.S. Latinos were considered their own country, they would be the second largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world.

This numeric breakdown was the intro to an insightful conversation on the fastest growing minority market in the U.S. at the Florida Public Relations Association’s Capital Chapter’s very first Hispanic Marketing Panel last month. The panel brought in several impacting Latino marketing professionals —- including world-renowned ethnographer and marketer Dr. Felipe Korzennny, the Florida State University Center for Hispanic Marketing’s Antonieta Reyes Echezuria, and Moore Consulting Group Latino’s very own Fernando Rodriguez. At the core of the conversation were numbers that helped drive the relevance of the Latino market in the U.S.

These numbers are meant to be eye-opening fundamentals in understanding the sheer power. The majority of these numbers aren’t new. In fact, these numbers have aided me in making several pitches; I have several cheatsheets. Here are some highly visual aids about Latinos in the U.S.: the first is a video titled “The New American Reality” by Univision and the second is an amazing info-graphic by Latino Branding Power.